Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Extremely Helpful
Comment: I bought this book to teach myself PHP in order to build a data driven intranet site for my company. Everything I needed to learn was in there, and the topics were clearly explained with plenty of examples. Terrific buy.
Customer Rating:
Summary: From a PHP Novice's perspective
Comment: Being brand new to PHP, I found it very helpful to read through the primer this book offers on PHP basics to get my footing. From there, I have used the book as a reference to solve particular problems, such as setting up a module for uploading files from a client to my web server or using PHP to send emails from your site.
The book is very well written, clear and to the point, but with enough elaboration to keep you interested. Works well as either a reference or a read-through.
Recommended!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beginning PHP Not Beginning Programming
Comment: [This review refers to the second edition.]
A beginning PHP book, not a beginning programming book. The subtitle, 'From Novice to Professional', can be a tad misleading for the novice coder. A beginning programming book covers a lot of material that this book assumes the reader already understands. Many software books include a 'Who Is This Book For' section that offers some guidance on the suitable reader knowledge level, not this one.
That said, I found this book to be very helpful. The sections on installing and configuring Apache, PHP and MySQL certainly saved me many hours of reading the online documentation and tweaking of settings while setting up my local test bed. That, in itself, made me a very happy camper. The author goes on to cover the various aspects from the basics of the PHP language and class libraries to topics like Authentication, Security, Session Handlers and eMail functionality that help anyone new to PHP setup some fairly sophisticated site capabilities.
The second edition has been supplemented with an added 200 pages, including a new section on PEAR (PHP Extension and Application Repository). This is a wealth of prewritten classes and packages that can be used to add even more sophisticated functionality to the novice's web development toolbox. The author demonstrates several of the more prominent packages.
The second edition has greatly beefed up with additional coverage of MySQL 5, including chapters on stored procedures, triggers and the PHP mysqli extension (all missed in the first edition). Most of the examples offered are clean and general enough to be useful templates for the reader's tailoring.
My suggestion for novices to PHP is read through chapter 9, then skip to the various sections that solve specific problems being faced or are of particular interest, including installing and configuring your local test bed.
Bottom line, the first edition was a good book for intermediate to veteran programmers looking for a quick tutorial on PHP (circa version 5.0); the second edition is even better. Novice programmers should ensure that they have a full understanding of the basics of programming (and OOP) before attempting it. I would now use this book to teach a class on PHP.
P-)
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Definitely a Solid Text and Title
Comment: This is one of the better programming books I have seen in a long time. It really does give you what you need to set up a testing server on Linux or Windows, and heading down the road solidly. It is also a book that actually grows in value as you learn more coding. In essence, you come to undertsand better how to apply his tools and concepts, and PHP functions.
I do agree with most comments here, that this is not suitable for those who do not have some programming basics.Like so many 'beginning' programming books, its really for someone who simply hasn't programmed in that particular language. Though the examples are succinct, the bits of code are short by and large, and don't give a good view of the over all coding logic. Then suddenly a bit of complex code is thrown at you.
The result creates a bit of frustration for those with some experince, and would be defeating for those of virtually no experience. An example is how Sessions are handled. Unlike ASP 3.0, you have to use session_start() on each page, and check for a session before that, before you can actually call Session Variables. This is fairly significant, and yet absolutely no reference is made of this, so the code he uses doesn't actually work in that bit. I had to go online and hunt it down. Hence, the 4 stars.
Yes, the handling of MySQL is a bit brief, but defintiely gets your feet wet on the most basic of tactics, and he does a very good job of incorporating the uses of Classes here. As well he also talks about different Data Admins.
So, a very good book, useful to the novice and the pro, but in need of a few tweaks.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very thorough guide for programmers
Comment: As said in previous reviews, this book is NOT for those that have little/no knowlege in programming. I have had an introductory class in C++, and I understood much of what is in the book minus the object-oriented stuff. The book would be an excellent guide for those coming from PHP 4 and wanting to learn new features, as well as those experienced in at least one object oriented programming language.
Anyway, on to the actual book. The book has very little overlap in chapters, making it an extremely useful reference tool. It is not a very good book to straight up learn PHP, but rather a method to your madness. By this I mean that it is more useful to read the introduction and start fiddling in PHP then referring to the book to learn new things rather than reading the book and expecting to be able to write some useful code. Although skimming the book is always good to keep the various functions of the language in the back of your mind so you know what you can do, this will probably impact you very little. There is simply too much information to memorize.
So, here are the pros and cons:
PROS
-Excellent reference
-Very thorough
-Does not meddle in basic computer programming practices/terms
-If book were memorized, you really would be a professional in
PHP with a good base for other languages
CONS
-Does not meddle in basic computer programming practices/terms
-Has very few extended examples, mostly small scripts to do
something trivial
-Spends about 1/5 on concept, 4/5 on syntax and functions
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